


wait, wait, wait for me

by Dialux



Category: Fleabag (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Astronomy, Brother-Sister Relationships, F/M, Growing Old, Happy Ending, POV Second Person, Post-Canon, Science, Stars, haven't we all drowned at one point or another, um also one near-death experience but.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 00:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21778189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: Stars are born cold. They make their own warmth.This, too, you must learn for yourself.[The Priest walked away, but Fleabag wasn't his first love. Over the years, he returns to some and grows over others. A journey of returning to roots, looking up, and growing old.]
Relationships: Fleabag/Priest (Fleabag)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	wait, wait, wait for me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladywaffles (JaneEyre)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneEyre/gifts).



> Hello ladywaffles! I hope you enjoy this fic! I tried to stick to the prompt of a happy ending, but the complexity of the actual tv show- and the beauty of its complex/open endings- meant I wasn't entirely sure I could carry it off, hence the... not _entirely_ white picket fence conclusion!
> 
> Definitely inspired by [this Seth Meyers Interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GlTzzX31J8) that PWB gave back in October, which has, um, a couple interesting points:  
> a) she's an AMAZING procrastinator like me, so I defo stan now  
> b) she'd like to visit Fleabag when she's older! The phrase that launched a thousand ships, yada yada yada, I took that premise and RAN with it
> 
> Further notes (that could be spoiler-y) are at the end of the fic! Hope y'all enjoy!

(When you were twelve, your sister pushed you into a river.

For days after, your lungs had ached for breathlessness. Your back was scraped raw from the embankment that caught you and gave you purchase enough to crawl to land. You’d turned over, flopping breathlessly onto the shore, too tired to move. The sun’s rays had beaten down on you. It left what little skin wasn’t pink- from falling into the water- peeling.)

You don’t remember anything else, now; you have forgotten the chill of water, the creeping fear of death, the pain of drowning. All that you know is the warmth of the sun. The blaze of it. You’d closed your eyes on that muddy shore and the sun was still there, orange from beneath your eyelids. You could have picked out the veins in your eyelids if you had any skill with a pencil, two shades darker than the rest of your skin. It had felt so _good,_ and you hadn’t been able to look away, not even when you worried that you’d never get the glowing imprints to leave your sight.

In all the years after- you have looked away, you have shut your eyes, you have hated its very sight.

In all the years after, you have not managed to forget.

…

Do you know that when some stars die, they go so bright it won’t matter what shield you put up? They’ll leave you blind if you’re close enough. Doesn’t matter if you put your hands over your eyes; they’ll blaze through such petty things as mortal flesh.

They leave a ruin to remember them, as well. A ghost of what they’d once been. 

You are not a star; you have never been that good. But, oh, _oh-_

How you love them.

…

You walk away from her because you do not have the strength to love her from afar. You can see that she will beg you if you allow her, and you do not have the strength to deny it one moment more than necessary. But she is young, and you are young, and your hearts will mend with time. You are not a man of science any longer, but you know this: the body will heal, even when you are not ready for it. Time is an inexorable force and you will heal, because you are young and you are capable. 

This is what you know: there are some people that are stars.

You have never learned to look away from them.

…

You walk away from her and her laughter and the stiffness of her smile when angry, the softness of her skin when you run your fingers across her stomach, on the inside of her knees, between her breasts-

You walk away and look up, to the moon shining through even the weak cloudlayer above you. It isn’t drizzling; the wind is cold. Your chest kind of hurts. You look at the Orion Nebula, so small it can be covered by the idea of water in your eyes, so vast light takes more than two decades to cross it, and you think: _perspective._

Everything’s perspective, isn’t it? 

You can only hope this fracture in your heart knows that, too.

...

(There is a red star in the sky called Betelgeuse. Beneath it, in a sharp angle, shines a blue star called Rigel, seventh-brightest star in the night sky. They are the brightest stars in Orion the Hunter, hung in the stars by Artemis-the-goddess for his heroics, and within the constellation is a small, shining dagger that drops down- three stars, one after the other, in a sharp line. The second of the three stars is not actually a star, though. 

It’s a star nursery. It is one of the coldest places in the universe. 

If you look close enough, you will realize that it isn’t one pinprick of light, but a dispersed cloud of them, all swirling and aching to be born.)

…

You don’t move away, but you stop going to the places that she usually attended. Instead of seedy bars you favor some hipster cafes; you stop accepting people’s invitations home so you can focus instead on your writing; you publish, in the course of seven years, enough self-help and wryly self-deprecating and casually commentative books to build a decent nest egg. You shift away from London to a smaller town near it, and then a bit further, and before you know it you’re overseeing a sleepy hamlet in Wiltshire, so small and uneventful and isolated that you can head out and stargaze for hours at a time without anyone bothering you. You go out whether sunshine or rain, but you aren’t so young as you once were and you often find yourself pulling grass from the _strangest_ places.

It’s a quiet life. 

When you left the stars behind, you hadn’t thought about it very much at all. But you do now; you cannot stop thinking about them. About white fire, and blue fire, and red fire, and the stars that shatter to give everything you have ever known. You don’t have tragedy dodging you as so many others- as _she_ does- but you have a singing in your bones that you’ve ignored before, but never managed to silence.

You think about what you’ve left behind, and what you’ve wanted to leave behind, and what you’ve never quite managed to leave behind. Once upon a time, you’d never have wanted to abandon London. Once upon a time, you’d never have wanted to abandon the stars.

And now you’ve returned to one by leaving the other, and it feels… not wrong. Actually: it feels, impossible, terribly, right.

…

You write books; you dabble in paint; you shovel earth in the garden straight off your church and plant snowdrops; you caress their soft white petals when they finally come in. You write long, winding sermons and then scrap them in favor of shorter ones so the children don’t need to fidget as much and can enjoy the sunlight for as long as possible. 

All of that is very secondary to what you do at night: for wintertime is the best time to stargaze. The light shines better immediately after a snowstorm, and if you’re very lucky you can get an angle on some stars that you won’t ever manage to see otherwise. You have a notebook full of scribbles of the constellations _you_ see, beyond those your ancestors once named. 

The angle of Polaris and Procyon making a wand in a maestro’s hands. An hourglass in the place of Orion. A glittering triangle bisecting half the sky with the Winter Triangle, interspersed liberally with what once had been part of Orion’s bow. Vega, shining, a beacon holding court among lesser mortals. 

Deneb shines in summer in Cygnus, the swan, and that is the one constellation you do not change. The lines of the cross are stark in your mind. The idea of suffering, and sins, and your choices weighted on another man’s neck.

(This is not the reason, of course. You look at the swan, and you think of _her,_ of her long neck and her fierce, piercing eyes; of the way she spoke, like it meant nothing to tear apart her entire life or yours, not if it was for love. Like she could give up her pride and her family and her business and everything she had built up so painstakingly, so steadily, all for _you.)_

(There are many reasons you like to stargaze more in the winter.)

...

There is little that has frightened you quite as much as her, you think, sometimes, when the memories don’t hurt so much, nor sting. Perhaps that is why you left. But it was not _only_ that, was it?

…

Stars are born cold. They make their own warmth. 

This, too, you must learn for yourself.

…

You wake up and it’s just past midnight and your bladder aches. The stars are invisible behind a thick film of clouds. The streetlights are also off- Swann, the town’s sole councilmember who finds his duties to the city a matter of importance, usually turns the municipal electricity off when he thinks nobody should be out and about- and it’s so dark the garden right in front of your bedroom window is rendered invisible. You roll out of bed; stumble to the washroom. You sigh as you return.

Sleep doesn’t come to you, and you finally give it up- you leave the warmth of your bed, fumble a woolen robe over your shoulders and stumble outside. 

The wind is cold. Biting.

It’s muscle memory that saves you bruises, knowing the number of steps from your door and down the path to the garden. You stop a hairsbreadth from toppling over the shin-high wall dividing the garden from the rest of the church and hiccup, once, before swinging yourself over. You settle in the hollow, open alcove right off the vegetable garden a few feet away, fingers running over the rough stone and guiding you without light to help.

You look up at the stars, and think: _implode._ From Latin’s _plodere,_ which means applause. 

The stars implode because their every moment is a battle, fought between gravity- which wants to crush them- and their own blazing heart- which wants them to burn on and on and on. Gravity will always win; it is inevitable. But before the stars collapse on themselves they’ll burn so bright they will be known for galaxies and galaxies.

And somewhere, in some quiet room in a quiet village in a quiet time, a quiet man thought: _an inevitable death? A glorious, billion year long battle against the darkness?_

_That deserves applause._

There are stars out there that are dying right now, and you will never know it because you will be dead by the time the light reaches earth. The light that is reaching you, when you look at the stars, is so old that the earth did not even exist when it first left the star. 

So. Here you are. Young priest, old man. Star-lover sworn to God.

You are finding that you are a man who wants everything, and will not settle for less. You are finding that you are not quite so patient as you’d once thought. Your head aches, and you are too old to be sitting and stargazing on cold stone. You are- 

You are not who you thought you would be. 

…

That is not as bad as you’d once feared.

…

Here is what you are:

  1. A man who runs away, far and fast.
  2. A man who is scared often.
  3. A man who loves fiercely.
    1. A man who loves apologetically.
  4. A man who does not trust himself.



Well. The irony is the self-help book. You think you could keep some better dignity if you hadn’t gone out of your way to pretend a personal journey that gave you the courage to accept yourself. Your publicist had pushed for more such details and you’d supplied them without hesitation, but now… Now you regret it, in the dull, distant fashion of someone who knows they’d do the same thing if given a second chance, despite knowing the pitfalls of their decision.

…

You left the stars when you realized that it wasn’t enough. It’s all about relativity: things change based on where you’re standing. Black holes, white holes, alternate dimensions and measuring dark matter. There is joy in dancing among places that laymen would take decades to understand- because it’s taken _you_ that long to understand- but.

But.

Not enough.

Your mother died when you were twenty-six. Halfway through your doctorate. A quick death; a car accident, but an autopsy revealed she’d had cancer for a few months before that would’ve likely reduced her lifespan anyways. This at least was painless. Your sister moved away to London, where she found a husband and settled down close to the city. And all that was left of you was the kind of dizzying loneliness that could’ve swallowed you whole.

You needed something to ground you. You knew that. 

So you grabbed at the priesthood offered to you, and you ran, and you didn’t look back for so fucking long.

Until, of course, _her._

…

Some children ask you why you keep wandering around the moors. You chase them off with gruff answers but cannot keep it up when faced with their irrepressible enthusiasm. And it takes almost nothing to point it out to them: look, see. _That’s Procyon, and that’s_ Canis Minoris, _the little dog. If you squint you can see a throne where a queen was chained. If you really want, I can show you Orion’s bow._

About a week later, a few parents join up with you, blowing on their fingers and stamping their feet, but interested. Your club slowly grows. Not much; you aren’t a telescopy club, and it’s very informal, but there’s something they seem to enjoy in seeing what constellations people saw thousands of years ago, and rewriting them to their own considerations.

After a month, you give into the peer pressure and make an official day of it. Once a month, on the new moon, you’ll hold a- you hesitate to call it a class, because you aren’t teaching; it’s a bonding experience more than anything- stargazing night for people to see and construct patterns in the sky.

(It takes very little time for them to start calling it a star-circle, a club for those who aren’t into knitting or reading or any of those very quiet hobbies the majority of the people in the village tend to take up.)

...

You are in your sister’s flat in Surrey. Her husband and daughter are outside playing football, their shrieks echoing through the cracked window next to you. She looks very similar to you, of course, brown-haired and brown-eyed and with that peculiar ability that means both of you look sardonically amused at the world even when you aren’t attempting to look any particular thing.

“Remember the time you tried to kill me?” you ask.

Your sister eyes you wryly. “Oh, love,” she says, and pours out your tea, hot and spiced with lemon, just the way you like it. “If I’d tried to kill you, you’d be dead by now.”

“So the dunking in the river was…”

“Call it character growth.” She pushes the cup towards you. “Lord knows Mum wouldn’t have taught you any. One of us had to be the responsible adult.”

“Don’t pretend like you hated it.”

Her eyes meet yours, warm and brown, an echo of your own.

(There are stars revolving around one another in this universe, so close they cannot be told apart but never touch. There are planets like that, who will one day be consumed by the stars that created them. You and your sister, here, warm and quiet and laughing, dancing like people who will never touch, just the residual fingerprint of her hand on the cup warming your fingers, your hand on the memory of hers-)

She reaches out and takes your palm in hers, and all of your thoughts stutter to a halt. “It might,” she says contemplatively, “have been an enjoyable responsibility.”

You _laugh._

...

You drive home humming, in a better mood than you’ve been in for a long time. The radio spits something old and familiar- the Beatles, the Stone Roses, someone crooning quietly into a microphone accompanied by sharp, catchy music. The sun slips low in the sky and sits, fat and heavy, for a long time; you drive with it burning red against your right cheek. By the time you reach your home, the stars are out and gleaming, and there’s a crowd gathered around your driveway. 

_Of course,_ you think. The new moon. 

You offer one of the kids an apologetic look and step outside of the car, rest your chin on the hood. “Give me ten,” you call out to the crowd. “The usual spot today?”

There’s a general rumble of agreement, and you head into the house quickly.

It’s good weather for a hike. It takes only a few minutes to pack a water bottle and a heavy coat, lace yourself into boots that won’t let mud seep into your socks, and catch up with the last stragglers joining you at the meadow. The rest of the walk passes in conversation with Diane, a master’s student who’s thinking about switching from one lab to another. Most of the science goes over your head- it’s so much _biology,_ Christ- but the interpersonal drama of research labs doesn’t. It’s with equal parts nostalgia and relief that you leave Diane behind when you reach the meadow that has everyone milling around, mumbling and sketching and getting started.

Something skips over the rest of the crowd, something familiar but not entirely recognizable, and you dismiss it even as you start going around the people, discussing and joking around and chatting about their newest creations.

Then you hear it again, and you jerk upright, searching through the people for some hint of who-

_Oh. Oh, fucking-_

Just as you see her, she sees you. 

…

The years have been kind to her: her hair is a little lighter, and there are more wrinkles pressed into the lines of her face, but she’s just as tall as ever. You can barely breathe as you pick your way over to her. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” she says, and sounds wry. 

Underneath the plausible denial, you think there’s something like delight, and the very idea runs through your blood like hot flame. 

“Stars,” you say, a little helplessly. “Always liked ‘em, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Of course she didn’t. You’d hidden it for those wild months you’d met her, this first and fierce love of yours. It isn’t anything that people want from a priest, science and facts- they want comfort, and you’ve given it to them, you’ve been _good_ at giving it to them, to the point that you’d hidden this in favor of that. God. You’d been a very stupid man all those years ago.

“Well.” You cough into your fist. “What’ve you been up to?”

“A bit of this and that.” She cuts a look at you, sly and wickedly daring, and you feel yourself smile almost before she speaks. “Spent quite a lot of time campaigning for the Church to promote clerical celibacy again.”

“What, _why?”_

“If I couldn’t sleep with you, why should anyone else?” She shrugs. “I’ve always said there’s two kinds of people in the world: people who are spiteful and aren’t. Any guesses what I am?”

You laugh, out loud and loud for it: full-throated, a little higher-pitched than you like to think your voice will go. “It’s been a- while,” you say. “You might’ve become nicer since we last saw each other.”

“Nope,” she says easily. “Once a cunt, always a cunt.”

Someone taps you on the shoulder, asking for advice on something or other, and you pause before you can look away from her. 

“Look,” you say quickly. “I have- I’d like to talk. Later. How long are you here?”

“My train leaves in the morning. Back to London.”

“A drink, then.”

“Okay.” Her eyes dip away, then back to yours, and she looks like time hasn’t touched her at all, nose sharp and jaw sharper and gaze the sharpest of them all, coring straight into your skin. “Should I come find you, then?”

“Nah,” you say, before you can talk yourself out of it. “I’ll do that bit. You’ve come this far, haven’t you?”

…

You lead her to your kitchen, a place that might have looked comforting in firelight, but only appears cold and iron-filled under the pale fluorescent bulbs you’ve installed. As she’s taking off her coat, you head down to your cellar.

 _I like my alcohol to taste like it,_ she’d once told you, and you aren’t about to pretend that you don’t remember, so you run your fingers past the bottles of cider or sweet wine, and let them alight on the heavy, old glass of a bottle of rum. When you emerge up the stairs, she’s waiting for you, lounging against the opposite wall with dark, heavy-lidded eyes.

“Rum?”

“Please.” 

“You’ve changed,” she says, as you pour two fingers into the first glasses you can find.

Turning, you offer her one glass and seat yourself in one of the wooden chairs. She doesn’t lean forwards to take the glass; instead, she comes around, so her knee nudges yours, and settles her hip against the table. You look up into her face.

“You haven’t,” you say.

But it isn’t the truth, is it? 

There are lines on her face that you couldn’t see under the stars, laughlines at the corners of her eyes, wrinkles at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are clearer now than they had been all those years ago. Her hair is longer, and pinned back in a different fashion, and it makes her entire face look a little softer. 

“Good or bad?”

“Good. I think.”

She laughs. Then she wiggles backwards so she’s sitting on top of the table, unheeding of the warning creak of the table’s old wood, the glass and the golden liquid within cradled between careless fingers and loose wrists. 

“Tell me,” she says, eyes bright as Sirius, brightest star in the night sky, “about these stars.”

The thing is, you’ve spoken about many things. About your journey, about your growth. About your mother’s death. About your loneliness. You have spoken about them in book tours and sermons, in confessional booths and organized rallies. About the stars, too, and how they shine; what they do. But in all that time, in all those thousands of hours-

-you have never spoken of _this._

Not the weight of the stars on your heart. Not the weight of them, thick and cloying and true, on your tongue and your mind. You have a hundred words for everything else, but not this: not the way their shine makes your heart lighter, and some cold aching hollow in your gut fill. Trust her to know your heart, and to find it, before you even had the courage to name this. Trust her to look as she does, a vision with hair just starting to grey, the glitter of glasses peeking out of her coat pocket, everything you’d once given up and always wanted back.

...

(Polaris wasn’t always the North Star, you know. And one day far in the future, true north will no longer point to Polaris. There was once someone, with a pen in one hand and a telescope in the other, who’d found that out. Who found out that what seems permanent is transient. It’s all a matter of scale. It's all relative.

Once, you'd been so scared of that. 

Now, there's a comfort to it. Nothing matters. Things that might have meant everything to you twenty years ago aren't quite as important now, and that's alright. This, too, is not a shattering event of the universe- and even if it was, there will be good that comes of it. As gold can only come from a supernova, so can brightness from a shift of your purposes.

Nothing matters. But.

The corollary to that: by that same measure, everything matters.)

...

You look at her, and you let the alcohol burn the back of your throat, and you close your eyes. 

Then you open them, and for the first time in your life, you talk about the stars you love.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Congrats for finishing the fic!  
> \- Title comes from "Little Talks" by Of Monsters and Men  
> \- All information on stars/astronomy is completely accurate.  
> \- I tried (??? not much, I'll admit) to google how many clear nights Britain tends to have during winter, but couldn't get a lot of data on that so if y'all want to blame me for lack of accuracy on that count, I'll accept it.  
> \- I didn't _want_ to write this in second person, but how else was I supposed to avoid saying "The Priest" in every other sentence when we don't know his name? How does anyone write in any other POV in this fandom? I have no idea. Y'all clearly have far more imagination than me.  
> \- I've got no flipping clue how priests are supposed to work. Also, the difference between Anglican/Catholic is like, not going to be something I google. Ever. So I a) have no idea which denomination the Priest is supposed to be; b) if that denomination has any rules pertaining to celibacy; c) am literally entirely unaware of any issues w that bit of the story. I'm sorry?  
> \- Other than that, everything should be good.  
> \- Hope you enjoyed it!


End file.
